Mar. 23, 2016, 11:51 a.m.

French newspaper Le Monde and Belgian newspapers De Standaard and La Libre are reporting that the second airport suicide bomber is Najim Laachraoui, whom police had been searching for in connection with the Nov. 13 Paris attacks.

Two pictures of Najim Laachraoui released by Belgian Federal Police. (Belgian Federal Police)

Mar. 23, 2016, 2:44 p.m.

Najim Laachraoui was one of the suicide bombers at Brussels Airport on Tuesday, a U.S. official said. He has previously been linked to explosives used in the Paris attacks in November.

“We have no reason to doubt” reports that he was killed, the official said.

Police announced on March 21 that they were searching for Laachraoui in connection with the Nov. 13 Paris attacks. The announcement followed the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, who is accused of playing a key role in the Paris plot.

Advertisement

>

Mar. 23, 2016, 1:09 p.m.

The Islamic State militant group has trained at least 400 fighters to target Europe in deadly waves of attacks, deploying interlocking terrorist cells like the ones that struck Brussels and Paris with orders to choose the time, place and method for maximum carnage, the Associated Press has learned.

The network of agile and semiautonomous cells shows the reach of the extremist group in Europe even as it loses ground in Syria and Iraq. Officials, including European and Iraqi intelligence sources and a French lawmaker who follows the jihadi networks, described camps in Syria, Iraq and possibly the former Soviet bloc where attackers are trained to attack the West. Before being killed in a police raid, the ringleader of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks claimed to have entered Europe in a multinational group of 90 fighters, who scattered "more or less everywhere."

Mar. 23, 2016, 11:55 a.m.

Mar. 23, 2016, 11:08 a.m.

An official in the Turkish president's office says the Brussels attacker who was deported from Turkey was Ibrahim El Bakraoui.

The official corrected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's account, saying El Bakraoui, who was caught in June at the Turkish-Syrian border, was deported in July to the Netherlands, not to Belgium.

Turkey says it warned both Belgium and the Netherlands that he was a "foreign terrorist fighter."

Mar. 23, 2016, 10:10 a.m.

President Obama derided the idea of monitoring Muslim neighborhoods or conducting a “carpet bomb” campaign against the Islamic State, saying Wednesday that such proposals – made by GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz – would compromise American values while making “absolutely no sense” in the fight against terrorism.

Addressing ideas floated by Cruz since the bombings in Brussels, Obama said surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods would violate the principles of freedom that drew Cruz’s father to the U.S. from his home in Cuba – where Obama made a historic visit this week.

“I just left a country that engages in that kind of neighborhood surveillance, which, by the way, the father of Sen. Cruz escaped for America, the land of the free,” Obama said. “The notion that we would start down that slippery slope makes absolutely no sense … and it’s not going to help us defeat ISIL,” he said, using an acronym for the terrorist group.